The term “Emergency Manager” was not invented by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his corporatist Republican colleagues. In fact, Emergency Managers existed before that crew got around to passing what is perhaps the most anti-democratic legislation ever seen in the United States. According to the U.S. Council of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), Emergency Managers are professionals whose […]

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder began his opening statement before the House Government Oversight Committee hearing on the Flint water crisis by saying, “I am not going to point fingers.” In the same statement and in comments made during questioning, he then blamed the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the failure to […]

Yesterday’s Flint water crisis hearing held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was an astonishing thing to watch. As the beleaguered city is still reeling from the poisoning of its drinking water and the death of at least nine people from Legionnaires’ Disease, one of the men chiefly responsible for the catastrophe declared said that he’s been “unjustly […]

As we know all too well here in Michigan, once an Emergency Manager takes over a city, none of the elected leaders holds any power. In fact, anything they have done up to that point is considered to have been done by an inept, possibly corrupt, group of elected officials. Otherwise, an Emergency Manager wouldn’t have been needed. It’s at […]

NOTE: This post has been updated HERE. As I wrote about earlier this week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette are asking the taxpayer of our state to foot the bills for their legal bills related to defending Snyder from the lawsuits filed against him for his response to the poisoning of Flint’s drinking water with the […]

It’s a uniquely Michigan story. To pinch pennies — saving $5 million, a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions in corporate tax cuts Rick Snyder and Republicans have handed out while slashing government services — a city had its drinking water switched and poisoned with lead by an autocratic “emergency manager” who was appointed by and only reported to […]

With Emergency Managers now a four-letter word in Michigan, the Snyder administration has come up with a new way to take over public schools without having to invoke the epithet. In their on-going effort to “run government like a business”, they have appointed a “School District Chief Executive Officer (CEO)” for East Detroit Public Schools: A chief executive officer will […]

It’s a good gig if you can get it Darnell Earley, the disgraced former Emergency Manager for the city of Flint and, more recently, Detroit Public Schools (DPS), will receive $82,862.90 through mid-July to work as a consultant for the school district. Earley resigned his position last month because, according to his jaw dropping assessment, he had rectified the school […]

The Michigan Democratic Party released shocking documentation this morning showing that a $7 million emergency loan to the city of Flint in April of 2015 came with a very deadly sting attached. Two actually. First, they were not allowed to return to water supplied by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). Second, they were compelled to remain in the Karegnondi Water Authority, a regional water system that won’t be completed until this summer. The two conditions had the effect of forcing Flint to stay with the Flint River as its source of drinking water, a decision that has led to the poisoning of Flint residents with the powerful, odorless, tasteless, invisible neurotoxin lead.

On Monday of this week, Gov. Rick Snyder formally appointed bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes to be the fifth Emergency Manager for Detroit Public Schools (DPS). DPS got their first Emergency Manager (they were called Emergency Financial Managers back then) in 2009 when Robert Bobb was appointed by former governor Jennifer Granholm. The year before Bobb took over, DPS had a […]

NOTE: There is simply too much news arising from the poisoning of Flint’s drinking water to do separate posts for everything. Therefore, I am assembling various news items into a single news round-up on a semi-regular basis. You can follow all of our coverage HERE. Former Snyder advisor concedes that “running government like a business” led to the poisoning of […]